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Penurious Penguin writes "After serving as Director of the CIA since September 2011, David Petraeus resigned from his position today, November 9. The retired four-star Army general has cited an extramarital affair as reason for the resignation. Michael Morell will now serve as Acting Director of the CIA."

That is the only thing that should be taken into consideration. As long as it was between consenting adults, an affair is between him, the 'afairee' and his family. As long as it doesn't effect one's job performance its really nobody's business.

It was his biographer. Not an employee or subordinate.
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Who really cares? His private life is just that...Private. If we have determined that bad judgment disqualifies a person from a leadership position then America is leaderless.

What an incredibly naive statement. His private life, as director of the CIA, is NOT as private as that "civilians". There is a very long list of people in sensitive positions that were blackmailed / recruited by foreign intelligence agencies for just this type of sexual impropriety. Doing what he did shows incredibly bad judgment, especially considering his military leadership experience and age.

That's the point- Many people -are- threatened by the release of the information; as the op said: "There is a very long list of people in sensitive positions that were blackmailed / recruited by foreign intelligence agencies for just this type of sexual impropriety.". It might not be a problem for you, but it has been for a lot of others.

Yes, but not being able to conceal an affair doesn't speak well for his performance as a security agent.

It's the other way around. When getting a security clearance, one of the things they look for is any skeletons you have in the closet which could be used to blackmail you. The affair itself is not particularly relevant to his job. What is relevant is that he put himself in a situation where he could potentially have been blackmailed [wikipedia.org]. From best to worst, the possible situations for someone who's supposed to be protecting government secrets is:

No affair
Openly public affair
Affair, initially secret, but now admits to it
Affair, still keeping it secret

That's assuming that the fallout of this affair isn't going to impact his performance. It could be that the fallout of this and setting things right with his family again could keep him from his duties, or it could be as simple as he sees the role of Director as one that should lead by example, in some way embodying the integrity of the organisation. In that case, he wouldn't consider himself fit for such a role.

He said George H.W. Bush who, prior to being president and vice president, was CIA director [wikipedia.org] for just under a year in 1976. While this is probably prior to the involvement of CIA with death squads in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and after the Phoenix Program [wikipedia.org] in VietNam, it would be surprising if there wasn't CIA involvement with death squads in Guatemala, Argentina, Chile [wikipedia.org] (very likely), the Phillipines (also very likely) or another country [yahoo.com] with with one of the right-wing governments known to use death squads to silence political opposition during periods spanning the mid 70s.

While some of the death squad targets may have aguably been combatants like the Afghani and Pakistani targets of current Predator strikes, most were just citizens using speech to raise awareness of injustices perpetrated by the right wing governments and their cronies. You generally don't need death squads to kill combatants because the army can do that job. You use death squads to perform extra-legal killings of civilians in the middle of the night because they are being a political annoyance and you don't have (or can't be bothered to gather) evidence that they are involved in illegal activities.

All because of the fear that those countries would irreparably fall to communism like dominoes even though, when Nicaragua and El Salvador eventually fell, the eventual outcome wasn't as feared.

People working in the inteligence and other sensitive business can't afford to have "secrets", because it could lead them to being blackmailed. Maybe Petraeus decided it was the most ethical thing to do (he would probably insist other members of the staff to resign were they in the same situation...)

People working in the inteligence and other sensitive business can't afford to have "secrets", because it could lead them to being blackmailed. Maybe Petraeus decided it was the most ethical thing to do (he would probably insist other members of the staff to resign were they in the same situation...)

But once he went public with it, it was no longer a "secret", so could not result in blackmail.

No, but the fact that he kept secrets from the agency that could have been used to blackmail him means he's a security risk and therefore not of suitable character to work in the CIA. When you work for the CIA or any other government agency that keeps the nation's secrets, you can't keep such secrets from the agency.

To you it might not matter, but to him it certainly did. More insidious, the blackmailer could have simply required him to omit or downplay information being reported to the President or for subordinates in investigations, with no actual lying or outright obstruction necessary. His choice to prevent that is noble, even if the actions that he took that facilitated the situation weren't.

Right. Because the order of importance goes: POTUS, JSC, DCI and then, immediately after that, nurb432.

Who gives a crap what you think?

And its not about whether *you think* it would be a blackmailable incedent - because *you dont care* it IS ONE.

The point is:

a) He might not *want* to be outed - and willing to e.g. trade state secrets to prevent it from happening if someone finds outb) Since he's broken a critical mega-life-impacting vow (and if he has sincere religious beliefs, had a religious wedding, etc -
essentially put his desires above all of that as well, making it in effect multiple vows at once), he cannot be trustedc) Even if he wouldn't sell state secrets and would let himself be outed, there is no way to know this a priori, because he
has been proven to be untrustworthy in many levelsd) Allowing him to continue in the position when a,b,c are known (even in 'secret'/'classified' capacity is a HUGE political liability)

e.g. Fox News Headline: Barak HUSSAIN obama permits ADULTERER to run CIA. More proof that he is a closet islamist by supporting
ISLAMIC POLYGAMY and other related crap, etc.

e) Probably lied about the affair or nature of the relationship with whomever his partner was many times in the course of internal audits ( you do know intellegence professionals are required to register and discuss the nature of relationships with all aquaintences, and are frequently 'checked up on' by other groups of intellegence professionals - e.g. 'compartmentalized security', etc.)

f) Probably 1000 things I'm not thinking ofandg) He knows all of these things to be true, took vows keeping these in mind, probably thought them over 1000 of times every time he got turned on by women, and STILL DID IT.

So.. what kind of 'good job' is he actually doing when all of the above is true?

We're not talking about a gas station attendant, or even a surgeon here.We're talking about one of the most powerful people in the world. Literally. He is in charge of information that has a direct impact to your life. No matter where you live in the entire planet.

It was probably more for him to pick up the pieces then anything but there is the threat of someone trying to blackmail him or his spouse or a family member if they knew about the affair and he was trying to keep it secrete.

Of course this could just be an excuse to not wanting to work under another Obama administration considering the flack the CIA received over the Benghazi attacks.

Except he's agreed to abide by the military code of conduct. So it's not as easy to ignore an affair as it is for a civilian. His rank as general is gone.

There are several odd things about this. First, the FBI investigation should have happened when he was appointed to head the CIA so why is this coming out now? Did the FBI just get around to doing their background check or has the affair been known for some time? Moreover, since the only forced resignation was his generalship, why did he resign from headin

That is the only thing that should be taken into consideration. As long as it was between consenting adults, an affair is between him, the 'afairee' and his family. As long as it doesn't effect one's job performance its really nobody's business.

Don't know much about the guy, but he seems to be one of the more competent and reliable people on the public scene, and there's one problem with them - they have so much integrity that they resign even for petty reasons where a lesser person would fight tooth and nail to keep his position. Naturally, you end up with a bunch of scumbags, just like in politics.

The issue here is his particular job in intelligence. An extramarital affair, heavy drug use, or anything of the like is a job liability (not just a political liability) in public policy because it opens an opportunity for blackmail. That's the first problem. The second problem is that even if nobody finds out, you still have no idea what he's telling his mistress, or when they'll break up and she'll start talking. We can presume that whatever level of commitment she has in the relationship, it's probably not as high an investment as, say, his wife has in their marriage. Eventually, it will end.

Furthermore, since this whole thing is also supposed to remain a secret, that also minimizes the amount of overt protection he can afford his mistress. (This would be more of an issue, say, during the height of Cold War, when kidnapping an intelligence chief's mistress for interrogation might one day be a tempting enough target for an enemy agency. Still, it's a possibility.) There are a whole slew of operational issues built into the secrecy of this that make mistresses a bad idea for anyone in intel, with the reasons becoming more important the higher up the chain of command you go.

So now he's come clean. Doesn't that short-circuit the danger of a secret mistress? Sort of, but now you have the inherent personnel problem: it's hard to tell your operational agents about the dangers of secret affairs when you're doing it yourself.

Then you have the underlying issue of character: if he can't remain loyal to a marriage, why should we assume he can remain loyal to his country. I know that sounds like a leap. It is. But it's still the sort of question that needs to be asked. Secret societies -- even extremely popular ones, like the Masons -- have small secrets like handshakes, passwords, and rituals for a reason: if you can't trust a man with a trivial secret like a handshake, you sure as hell can't trust him with a big, juicy secret. Discipline has to be developed, and lack of discipline anywhere is a bad sign in the long run. Hell, military intelligence frowns on anyone who has more than two drinks per meal as being risky.

Not in the CIA. In a position where you carry sensitive information, an affair is a liability for two reasons: (1) the person with whom you're having the affair may be a spy and be working you for information. (2) the existence of the affair can be used to blackmail you.

Having an affair can therefore cause a person to lose his or her security clearance. It's even worse when it's the head or senior official in the agency because everybody looks to that person as an example. If the DCI's affair is tolerated, everybody else would assume that they could have affairs with impunity and expose the agency to many potential leaks and blackmail situations.

So in that regard, avoiding affairs and ANY OTHER situation that can potentially compromise security IS job performance.

Don't imagine Petreus did resigned on his own. His affair was discovered in the course of investigation of a possible security leak. The FBI was investigating and discovered evidence of the affair. Petreus, whatever you may think of him, resigned under pressure if he was not outright fired by President Obama for the security compromising situation.

And when china found out about this affair, threatened to tell his wife? Intelligence agents can't have secrets. Affairs, closet homosexuality, drug addictions are all primary ways for foreign governments to blackmail them.

Anything embarrassing can be used to blackmail someone, by political opponents and foreign agents alike. He was compromised, and this was the only way to ensure the integrity of the CIA, not just morally, but operationally as well. The latter consideration was likely the more important one.

That is the only thing that should be taken into consideration. As long as it was between consenting adults, an affair is between him, the 'afairee' and his family. As long as it doesn't effect one's job performance its really nobody's business.

Personally, It seems to me that someone with a demonstrable lack of integrity is not suited for the job of the director of the CIA.

And some girls get to have two boyfriends. Really, its no big deal, if people were meant to be monogamous we wouldn't need marriage in the first place. I mean of course it served a purpose in the medieval past as regards child protection and so on, but these days its a most peculair institution. If two (or three or four) people love one another they don't need legal contracts to petrify the emotion.

As for sex, come on. Why do love and sex have to be the same thing? Cats have sex, dogs have sex, animals have sex constantly without ever having to form lifelong bonds. Its an activity, no different to any sport. People should enjoy themselves as they see fit without having to swear fidelity or mutual ownership, jealousy is a poisonous emotion.

That's fine, as long as all parties involved are aware of the situation. I guess you were so excited at the prospect of TWO girls that you forgot about that bit. This guy didn't have two girlfriends, he had a wife and a secret lover. There are enough diseases floating around these days that if i was the wronged partner i'd be pretty pissed off on that basis alone, and that's before you bring all the trust issues into it.

If you would violate the trust of someone you made a marriage vow to, I wouldn't trust y

He resigned 5 days prior to the congressional hearing on what transpired at the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and other US personnel. Hillary Clinton took full responsibility for the lack of security, and of course the media let it die out right there and not have any negative repercussions on Obama or his administration in general. The buck stops with Hillary. Or whomever else it can stop at short of Obama.

Doesn't matter, they should subpoena his ass. This doesn't make the information in your head go away, or any less valid. Over all, it seems like the underside of the Benghazi bus is getting pretty crowded with all the people being thrown under it.

Doesn't matter, they should subpoena his ass. This doesn't make the information in your head go away, or any less valid. Over all, it seems like the underside of the Benghazi bus is getting pretty crowded with all the people being thrown under it.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has already removed him from the schedule. This is how you cover up that the US State Department operation in Benghazi was a cover for a CIA operation (they were watching Libyans smuggle Gadaffi's weaponry to the Syrian rebels).

He resigned 5 days prior to the congressional hearing on what transpired at the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and other US personnel.

Oh, for crying out loud. Look, maybe there was a genuine conspiracy relating to the Benghazi attack. Or maybe there wasn't and shit just happens.

But, if you want to convince anyone else of your case, you have to stop treating every shadow like it's a smoking gun and every government official like they're a co-conspirator until you have real, substantial evidence. That's the way it works: you don't get to claim conspiracy just by randomly picking facts to be a story and hoping some of it pans out.

Hillary Clinton took full responsibility for the lack of security, and of course the media let it die out right there and not have any negative repercussions on Obama or his administration in general.

No, "the media" did not stop once Queen Hillary claimed responsibility. I heard an awful lot about it after that, and I still do. It isn't the number one most important issue we have, but it did not go away because of some massive conspiracy designed to keep Obama in office, nor has it gone away yet. I think you phrased it wrong and what you meant to say is, "I'm a right-wing extremist and a sore loser who blames everything I don't like on vast, unprovable, vague conspiracies." Sorry if our guy isn't perfec

'Shit' didn't just happen. A pending attack or assassination was a big concern for Ambassador Stevens months beforehand, and his requests for more security went nowhere.

Requests for all sorts of things are denied by superiors all the time for all sorts of reasons. Some reasons are good, some reasons are bad, and some reasons are even criminal, but you haven't established which one it was. I would suggest you present the substance of this supposed request, and show how a reasonable boss should've granted it.

August 2, 2012: Ambassador Stevens sends a cable to D.C. requesting "protective detail bodyguard postions" -- saying the added guards "will fill the vaccum of security personnel currently at post... who will be leaving with the next month and will not be replaced." He called "the security condition in Libya... unpredictable, volatile and violent."

Ambassador Stevens was referring to Benghazi, not "a different embassy" as you claim.

September 11, 2012: 9:43 a.m. Benghazi time (3:43 ET): Amb. Stevens sent cables to D.C., including a Benghazi weekly report of security incidents reflecting Libyans' "growing frustration with police and security forces who were too weak to keep the country secure."

Again, Benghazi, not "a different embassy", as you claim.

9:40 p.m. (3:40 p.m. ET): Gunfire and an explosion are heard. A TOC agent sees dozens of armed people over security camera flowing through a pedestrian gate at the compound's main entrance. It is not clear how the gate was opened.

The agent hits the alarm and alerts the CIA security team in the nearby annex and the Libyan 17th of February Brigade, one of several powerful militias serving as a de facto security presence in Benghazi. The embassy in Tripoli and the State Dept. command center were also alerted.

State Dept. Diplomatic Security follows events in real time on a listen-only, audio-only feed, according to testimony of Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant director for international programs, given before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Oct 10.

This is, once again, at the Benghazi embassy, not someplace else. A real-time feed of the audio was being monitored in DC. They knew what was happening. It wasn't a reaction to someone using their right of free speech, and shouldn't have been apologized for.

10:25 p.m. (4:25 p.m. ET): A six-member CIA team arrives from the annex with 40 to 60 members of 17th of February Brigade. The team removes Smith's body.

Hmm. 9:40PM to 10:25 PM. I do the math and get 45 minutes, not the 28 minutes you claim. An nearby annex with military forces that takes 45 minutes to show up.

But these are all lies from "Fox News", right? Try again. CBS [cbsnews.com]

An nearby annex with military forces that takes 45 minutes to show up.

Yes, because everyone always has everything in a running car that is needed to deal with a forceful incursion, and everyone is always immediately clear who is doing what to whom. And no traffic jams. Ever.

People who think that the CIA team should have been there in 15 minutes and who think that troops should have been there in two hours would have sent in unprepared troops who are more likely to shoot at the own team than at the enemy.

Fucking morons. Logistics and operational due diligence decides wars. Not

Ambassador Stevens was referring to Benghazi, not "a different embassy" as you claim.

Again, Benghazi, not "a different embassy", as you claim.

Actually, you partisan hack, there is no mention of Benghazi in CBS's time line. Just as an FYI, the embassy is in Tripoli, and the consulate is in Benghazi. Since you clearly don't understand the difference, I question how you can have any opinion at all on how diplomacy was conducted in Libya, it's purpose, and the logic behind the security assessments. There were indeed very specific requests for increased security detail, but your CBS article isn't the source for that. A much better source is here: http [go.com]

"killing a US Ambassador and dragging his body through the streets is a massive incident."yes it is. It's so important you should get some facts straight.

"t. The fact that he requested additional support and was refused"the request was for a different embassy.

" The fact that the same people who should have gotten him more security lied about"which has been shown to be wrong over and over again. Ever wonder why Romney didn't harp on about it? Becasue Obama didn't lie.

" And this event isn't worth discussing?"not with people who can't even get the most basic facts about it correct. i.e. YOU.

No, because too many people don't care that the Administration left an American Ambassador out to die without protection and made no attempt to save him while watching the attack invade American soil in real time.

If this had been under Bush the mainstream media would be on his ass 24x7.

Oh, please. The mainstream media never got on Bush's ass 24x7 about *anything*. Ignore intelligence reports warning of an immanent attack? No problem. Let OBL get away? No problem. Lie us into a war? No problem. Authorize torture? No problem.

No. Waterboarding is torture and has never been legal in the US, self-serving double-talk from the Bush administration notwithstanding. Waterboarding is outlawed by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which have the force of law in the US. If the US were a country where the military is held responsible for its actions, both the people who did the waterboarding and the people who ordered them to do it would have been tried, found guilty, and imprisoned.

Oh please, if he had come out and immediately called it a terror attack, you'd accuse him of fearmongering in the run-up to an election.

He waited until all the facts were in. That's commendable.

But you know what? Keep banging that drum. Keep trying to get political benefit from the deaths of innocents. While you're at it, keep treating minorities like shit and keep calling rape-babies gifts from god and keep white-knighting for the super-rich. You're just making life easier for the rest of us.

Intelligence reported it as a protest which is exactly how the attack played out. He referred to it as a terror attack 2 days later. Please give it up? I look at is a fishing expedition to help Romney out and out of desperation this is the best the Republicans could find.

FYI Bush lied on a constant basis and the media did not go after him nearly as much.

Those guys in Washington D.C. cavort like rabbits so what is the real situation? Is he being moved aside to give somebody else a high profile job or was he unfit for the position and only got it in the first place by having a high public profile due to Afganistan?A vet from Afganistan I know describes Petraeus as a clown (but won't elaborate unfortunately), anyone have any ideas why?

Sorry, that sounds mean.Hey, do you know his definition of 'incomplete'?Balls and all!Sorry again.Thought of that because I heard the alleged affair was with his biographer Paula Broadwell.Title of the book coincidentally is "All In".

He had an affair with his biographer, which apparently began while he was active duty military in Afghanistan. Extramarital affairs are illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He'll be lucky if the DoD doesn't bring him out of retirement just to take a star off his shoulder.

But was his wife vetted for a clearance? What if Petraeus shared secrets with her, which she in turn whispered to the pool boy?

You can go down this road quite a ways. Better to hire someone who can string a mistress along without telling her anything of value. Completing a Leykis 101 [wikipedia.org] course should be mandatory for all US intelligence agents.

... you'll find that the affair was apparently discovered by the FBI during an investigation into Petraeus' biographer, Paula Broadwell.

"The biographer for resigning CIA Director David Petraeus is under FBI investigation for improperly trying to access his email and possibly gaining access to classified information, law enforcement officials told NBC News on Friday." (NBC News).

Interestingly, the Feds are always arguing that they don't need warrants to access your e-mail because it's inherently insecure.